Pirate Girl's Triathlon Adventures: Deuces Wild and 4 Corners XTERRAs

Deuces Wild XTERRA - 5/31/09

Yep, both of these reports are super late, mostly because the races were very disappointing and I don't like recounting bad races. So I'm going to keep this short because they are holding up my blog.

The weekend of the race in Show Low was very wet. It would be sunny in the morning, then rain in the afternoon. This does not make for very good trails, especially because the mud in the White Mountains is like peanut butter.

My swim went pretty well. My swims in Show Low are always much longer time-wise because the elevation really gets to me, but this year I took another 2 minutes off of my time, coming out of the 800 yard swim in 17:39. I hit the bike and was hoping for a better time from all the mountain bike races we had done. Didn't happen. The course was crazy muddy, and my bike tires were suddenly two huge chocolate donuts with rock sprinkles. There was much hike-a-bike, and I kept having to pick the bike up and drop it to remove rocks that would get stuck in the frame and freeze my rear wheel. The purple cinder road was the only good part, because that allowed most of the mud to spin off. I came into transition 8 minutes slower than last year's time. I was not happy.

On the run I tried to push myself because I really wanted to be in the 12 minute mile average range. I finished the run in 1:03:12, which was an improvement over last year of 9 minutes. I finished in 3:12:05, with an improvement of 11 minutes over last year, but missed 3rd place by 4 minutes. I was really hoping to break 3 hours, and adding 8 minutes on the bike totally screwed that up. Oh well...next year.

Since we didn't pre-ride the course, I don't have any pics of the course this year. And Zac was doing a relay with Shari, so he was unavailable for his usual photography duties. Liane's race report is here, and Nate got some great pics of the race and of Zac and Shari.

My bike after the race. It was clean before this. Like I said, much of the mud on the tires was flung off on the cinder road.

Our shoes took awhile to clean.

Four Corners XTERRA - 6/6/09

Ok, if I was disappointed at Deuces, 4 Corners made me realize what a disaster truly is. We really don't know how far the distances were. The swim distance kept changing...originally it was 1400 meters, then 1800 meters, then 1500 yards. Based on my swim time, I'm pretty sure they had left it at 1800 meters. Everyone I talked to agreed based on their swim times. I finished the swim in 34:05.

This is the crazy swim-run-bike XTERRA, so my transition ws 1:49 which included removing and bagging my wetsuit. I wanted to do better on the run because last year I walked a lot of the uphills. Well, this year I ran the whole thing AND ONLY WENT 1 MINUTE FASTER. What a distaster. I had heard that it was half a mile longer, and they did re-route the last part and made it more technical, so I guess comparing it to last year is next to impossible to do. But I still do it anyways. I got into transition just in front of another girl in my age group, and with my T2 of 1:54 I left before she did. But she quickly passed me.

I had fried my legs on the run so there was no gas left for the bike and the climbing. Oh, and they increased the bike by 2 miles. I had finished last year's race in 3.5 hours, so I'm not sure why they increased all the distances. Oh, and this year they said there would be a total course cutoff time of 4.5 hours. I finished in 3:53:44. For some reason, a ton of crazy fast freaky people showed up this year, so I was 8th in my age group.

This closed out a very disappointing XTERRA season. I've decided not to go to the national champoinships in Ogden. I'm currently 1st in points in my age group, so I will definitely qualify, but I don't feel like going after this round of races. I'd rather stay home and re-group and do some other events.

Liane and I setting up T2 (run to bike) first: